The area also has patriotic resonance: A site roughly the size of a football pitch was found after the demolition of a theme pub in Shadwell, east of the Tower of London, which was previously thought to be Londinium's boundary.

Although it is still considered unlikely that London spilled outside its walls, the discovery of what archaeologists described yesterday as a "major status building" suggests significant development on the periphery. This is very exciting. We started off with a very small trench, but we have had to keep going as we find more evidence.

Walls 5ft high have already been found along with what appears to be the foundation of a substantial building. The proximity of the site to the Thames, about a quarter of a mile to the south, has led Duncan Hawkins, the archaeologist supervising the dig, to believe that a port of some sort was established on a tributary of the river. With the recent discovery of other artefacts across the Thames in Southwark, there is evidence to suggest that Roman London could have been a commercial centre served by ports to its east and south.

The latest discovery came late last year when the developer George Wimpey called in an archaeological team after the demolition of Babe Ruth's sports bar on The Highway, Wapping, as required under its planning consent. In the northern half of the site were found miscellaneous artefacts dating from the second to fourth century.

These included the remnants of timber frame buildings, clay and plaster walls and floors and traces of wall paintings. Assorted items including pottery, coins and hairpins were found and removed from the site.

Towards the south, 5ft-high stone walls were found and the remains of an underfloor heating system covering 10 rooms, suggesting a building of considerable status and importance. This belief has been reinforced by other finds including a marble floor and a column. Although the walls will be preserved, they will not be put on public display. Instead, they will be covered with shingle and sand and buried underneath a small block of flats, to ensure that they are available for future archaeologists to inspect in centuries to come.

Thursday, 23 January, An excavation of what was once a medieval village and plantation town has yielded more than 20, artefacts. The foundations of homes and businesses dating back to the s have been uncovered during the five month dig. The site, situated between Hill Street and Waring Street, in the city centre was part of a redevelopment scheme by the pub company Life Inns.

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The armies of the Greeks, the Romans and the Crusaders fought here. In a recent excavation, Cline stumbled upon more than spent cartridge cases from the most modern Megiddo battle: A student of war at Armageddon, Cline offers up his list of the greatest battles, real and literary, and yet to come.

The biblical prophet Deborah asks her general, Barak, to marshal an Israelite army of 10, to defeat the Canaanite forces of King Jabin. The battle, which they won, was said to be fought near Megiddo. Egyptian Pharaoh Sheshonq attacks Megiddo, an event well-documented in extrabiblical sources, though due to sloppy archaeology, people are still confused about which layer of the tel, precisely, was attacked. A stone slab documenting his presence was found in a trench in the 20th century.

Josiah is killed at Megiddo by Pharaoh Neco of Egypt after the pharaoh warns him to stay away — at least according to the Bible. Starting inMaudud of Mosul and other Muslims launch a series of campaigns to retake their territory. Armies of Crusaders and counter-raiders roam the land, including the area around the Jezreel Valley and Mount Tabor, near Megiddo, untilwhen Egyptians retake the area for good.

As part of the strategy there, British Gen. Armageddon The penultimate battle to rock us before the end of the world is supposed to take place on the dusty mound, Megiddo. Then, from througha University of Chicago team peeled off layers of the tel, dumping entire cities into landfills, where once-valuable artifacts were now entirely out of context. The palace was supposedly commissioned by Solomon in the midth century B.

German archaeologist Gottlieb Schumacher stands near the corbel arch of a burial chamber at Megiddo in For years, Finkelstein discussed his concerns only with friends, but in he laid out his thoughts in the journal Levant. To help frame the question about the kings, he anchored his timeline with two Megiddo cities with precise dates already established from sources outside the Bible.

The first anchor, closer to the bottom of the tel and more distant in time, was a vast, wrecked city swept away by a regionwide collapse of society at the end of the Bronze Age, in the 12th century B. The second anchor, some years later and today sitting on the surface of the tel, was a city built by the Assyrians after their well-documented invasion in the eighth century B.

Four sequential cities with indeterminate dates were sandwiched between: Above that Canaanite city was a crude slum. Higher still, Finkelstein could see a monumental city with two ashlar palaces. And directly above that and right under the Assyrians sat a chariot city with stables for horses. Inside these four layers, Finkelstein would seek the kings. For boosters of David and Solomon, things did not look good. Even Yadin agreed the stables were built by the northern kingdom of Israel long after Solomon had roamed the Earth.

And Harvard scientists dated an assemblage of nearby pots on the same level as the ashlar palaces to the ninth century B. Unearthing the Layers Formulating a controversial hypothesis in a journal is one thing; proving it is something else.

Yet that is the work of the tel, where the digging and sorting and quiet chatter form an oasis of calm amid war. A Palestinian boy has just been murdered by Israeli extremists, abducted outside his home and burned alive in retribution for the dead Israeli teens found in a ditch the week before. Now the Arab residents of Umm el Fahm, a hillside village near Tel Megiddo, are hurling rocks at cars. Area K consists largely of domestic buildings. Megiddo Expedition Our buses take the long way, winding through back roads to the site in the early morning dark.

At the tel, black protective tarps soar over a series of stepped-down grids, revealing the sandwich of cities, one by one. It was when Eliezer Piasetzky, a nuclear physicist at Tel Aviv University, first visited these ruins. Although he professed just a passing interest in archaeology, Piasetzky was soon deeply enmeshed in the argument over the dates. Why not deploy radiocarbon dating, already used widely to date more ancient finds, he asked. The technique is based on the consistent ratio between two types of carbon molecules in all living things.

When we die, one form, carbon, stays steady, but another form, carbon, slowly degrades at a known rate, allowing chemists to calculate how much time has passed since the sample died. Finkelstein and Piasetzky refined the technique for their work at Megiddo, tapping the latest mass spectrometry equipment to identify chemicals by their mass and chargethe top labs and samples likely to yield the most accurate results.

They rejected wood samples that could be hundreds of years older than their use by humans, for instance, in favor of short-lived pits and seeds. An olive pit that happened to be cooking in a tabun an ancient oven at the moment of a violent destruction such as an earthquake was the best sample of all. Such a sample could not only be dated precisely, but could shed temporal light on everything crushed around it at the moment of the devastation.

With the new technique, the Megiddo researchers began to date buildings, pottery and olive pits to within a range of 40 years, a massive improvement over the year increments archaeologists had dealt in before. Finkelstein and Piasetzky now estimate that the red brick city of the Canaanites burned to the ground around B. It's eloquent, it's elegant, it's charming. I enjoy reading it. But as he examined it more closely he found something that didn't quite make sense.

It was all to do with the key phrase "I made repairs to the temple" or in Hebrew - "bedek a baied". The main problem in this inscription is this expression "bedek a baied".

In one word, this is an anachronism. According to professor Hurowitz, "bedek a baied" had a different meaning in the time of the Temple of Solomon to the meaning it has today.

In modern Hebrew it means to repair, but in ancient Hebrew it meant the exact opposite - to damage. So its use in this inscription made no sense at all.

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Now this in a Royal building inscription, where the king is taking pride in what he's done in the temple repairs, to say that he damaged the temple is absolutely ridiculous. Victor Hurowitz now had real doubts that the stone had been inscribed in the time of Solomon's Temple, almost 3, years ago. Unfortunately for the author, where it gets to the main part of the inscription and says I made the bedek a baied, he fouled up and he put in modern Hebrew.

But not everyone agreed with Hurowitz's interpretation. Professor Chaim Cohen is another expert in ancient Hebrew. He believes that there are so few texts discovered from the time of Solomon that no one can be sure how the language was used 3, years ago. It was simply the way the stone had been found that made everyone suspicious.

Had the inscription been found in controlled archaeological excavations it would have prompted scholars to say that now we must re-look at the way we've been seeing the vocalization in our Hebrew bibles to date.

Rewriting Tel Megiddo's Violent History | tutelasalute.info

Professor Cohen believes that if the stone had been found in a formal archaeological dig, no one would have questioned it. They simply would have seen the inscription as clarifying the use of ancient Hebrew words.

Beyond that, he was convinced that the stone could not have been the work of someone who made clumsy mistakes. If it is a forgery, then the forger must have been a near genius as far as the level of sophistication that we find in this inscription. The linguistic evidence was inconclusive. There was still no hard reason to doubt that the stone had come from the Temple of Solomon. Everything now hung on the investigations of the scientists on the committee.

The focus of their attention was the patina - the weathered layer on the outside of the stone. It was this, especially the charcoal particles that were dated to 2, years ago, that had convinced the scientists who had carried out the original analysis.

Elisabetta Boaretto was asked to re-date those particles. This is a very nice precise age, and calibrated this corresponded to an interval in time that goes from BC, before Christ, to BC. Her results seemed to confirm the original research - the charcoal in the patina was very old. But, it was theoretically possible for someone to have to taken charcoal from another source and added it to the patina.

For Dr Boaretto, the only way to be absolutely sure of the stone was to look again at the patina in which the charcoal was embedded. The man charged with this task was one of Israel's top archaeological investigators.

He has a detailed knowledge of both Biblical archaeology and the rocks of the Jerusalem area. He began by looking at the patina on the back of the stone. An authentic patina would be firmly attached to the underlying stone. This patina on the back of the stone is, actually it was very tightly connected to the stone. We needed a little chisel and a hammer to peel off small samples of the patina.

This was clearly a natural patina. But then professor Goren examined it under the microscope. He expected it to be made of calcium carbonate, which is local to the Temple Mount. But what he saw was this - a patina made only of silica.

This could not have formed in Jerusalem. In other words - the patina on the back of the stone could not have come from the Temple Mount. Puzzled, Professor Goren turned his attention to the patina covering the inscription on the front of the stone. Here, he did find calcium carbonate, just as one would expect of a patina formed in Jerusalem.

But now there was a new mystery - how could the patina on the front of the stone be different from that on the back? The answer began to emerge as Professor Goren sampled the patina from within the carved letters. Strangely - it didn't seem to be bonded to the stone in any natural way at all. The patina is very loosely connected to the stone. Here we can see how it reacts to me scraping it with a matchstick and you can see that it easily peels off the letters as opposed again to the patina on the back side.

And when he studied the patina on the front of the stone in detail he found something else even stranger - tiny marine fossils, called forams. Within the patina they are quite common, here we can see one, and here we can see another two. These fossils could only be found if the patina formed beneath the sea.

And the Temple of Solomon was nowhere near the sea. Of course one can't expect to find such fossils of plankton, of marine organisms, in patina that is created in the land environment. This was a complete mystery. It seemed impossible for a patina from a temple built in Jerusalem to contain the fossils of sea creatures.

Then came the most telling detail of all. When the letters are cleared, the inner part of the letter is exposed and as you can see here it is very freshly cut, you can see even the little lines, the little parallel lines of the chisel, or even maybe some drill, some electric bit or drill with which the letters were engraved, which is of course very unusual for ancient inscriptions.

So he put it all together - the inscription had been recently carved. There were two different patinas. And the one on the front contained marine fossils - impossible if it had formed in Jerusalem. He concluded the patina on the front of the stone was artificial - a mixture to which gold and iron age charcoal had been added by hand. And therefore I believe that the stone, or not the stone of course, but the inscription is not genuine.

Alarmed by what he'd found with the stone, Professor Goren turned his attention to the James Ossuary.

Again he found a similar story - a freshly cut inscription with an artificial patina applied over the top. On the 18th of Junethe Israeli Authorities delivered their conclusion. Good day to you, to all of us. The patina in the letters in both items is a modern forgery covering the letters. The conclusion is that the two inscriptions are modern inscriptions. This is a forgery, totally, without any doubt about it. The two most important biblical finds in a generation were proven to be fakes. There was no archaeological proof for the existence of Jesus Christ.

There was no evidence for the existence of The Temple of Solomon. There was now outrage in the world of Israeli archaeology. How had the forgers succeeded in fooling some of the country's top scholars? How had they managed to pull it off? Yuval Goren, whose work had helped expose the forgery, was determined to find the answers. Forgeries are a contamination of science, of archaeology as a science. Science is being biased, history is being biased, archaeology is being biased, and there is, the more sources like that appeal, forged, fake sources like that appeal, of course science is more distorted.

He began his investigations with the black stone itself. His analysis showed the stone was of a rock type that was not indigenous to Israel. He knew that for the inscription the forgers had needed and old black rock already cut to a rectangular shape - and he thought he'd worked out how they had acquired it. Just up the coast from Tel Aviv is an old crusader fortress.

The stones in its walls have already been cut to shape. Some of them are black. And many are not local - the crusaders brought them here. Ships that used to come to this place were loaded sometimes with ballast stones, to hold them balanced, and then they used to unload them, and so these stones were in many cases reused for buildings.